Philosophy of Language and Evolvement

Probably the most predominant Philosophical topic of the past century is Language, with the nature of Meaning as its central problem, i. e. how a manifold of sounds and scrawls can have significance beyond themselves. At one pole of the spectrum of responses is that Meaning is derived from how these manifolds are structured, because these structures are universal, and, hence, are comprehensible by anybody. On this view, Meaning is a property of Language in itself, just as it is in Mathematics. At the other end, Meaning is a function of context, and, hence, an expression of the commonality of interests of the participants in those contexts. On this view, Language is no more than arbitrary signs, just as it is in Morse Code. Corresponding to these two theories of Meaning are two main criteria of Understanding. One is a clear and distinct private cognition of the universal features of a word, sentence, or group of sentences. The other is a fulfilling behavior sequence. For Evolvementalism, Language and Meaning are features of Communication, which entails that they are fundamentally context-bound. But, Communication can also be more or less articulated, which is a degree of refinement of the Language involved. Articulation is a structural diversification of Language, and, hence, a diversification of the Communicative context. Communication is thus an Evolvement, to a lesser or greater degree, of its participants, in which Meaning is an objectification in the Language involved of that degree of Evolvement.